Gregg
Vanderheiden regularly washes his own clothes, but unlike most people, he never
loses any socks. He is immune to that modern plague because he uses sock sorters,
small plastic rings that keep each pair together in the laundry. I haven’t had
a mismatched or incomplete pair in years,” Vanderheiden said.

While this
minor invention seems a perfect product for a Lillian Vernon catalogue, it was
actually created for and originally marketed by organizations for the blind,
to help those without sight keep their matching socks together in the dresser
drawer.

Sock sorters
are not the only invention that has migrated to the general population. Some
of life’s more mundane innovations, including cut‑down curbs and large‑handled
can openers, have come about as solutions for the
disabled.

But so have
many more sophisticated, high‑technology inventions, like computer scanners
and optical character recognition software. And like many such innovations,
their usefulness to the rest of society has usually been realized only over
time.

When Thomas
Edison filed his patent for the phonograph in 1877, he listed 10 uses for the
machine. “Phonograph books, which will speak to blind people without effort
on their part,” was second; music was fourth.

Closed‑captioned
television, created to help the deaf, has become ubiquitous in the nation’s
health clubs, allowing people to watch soap operas or news shows while they
work out. Descriptive audio tracks – secondary audio programs that provide summaries
of a television show to help the blind follow the action – are popular with
home workers who want to keep abreast of a show’s developments but cannot always
stare at the screen.

What type
of person devises such solutions for what are, for most people, life’s minor
problems?

“Football
players don’t invent jar openers because they have no trouble opening jars,”
said Vanderheiden, head of the University of Wisconsin’s Trace Center, which
researches ways to improve access for the disabled to information and telecommunications
systems. “It takes somebody who can’t live with the way the world currently is
to create a new invention.”

Or somebody
in love with that type of person like Pellegrino Turri. In Italy in 1808, Turri
invented a machine to help his lover, the blind Countess Carolina Fantoni, write
letters to him.

That typewriting
device was not needed for the seeing population because upper‑class, literate
people had the time to write letters, using quill pens. Writing with a quill
was a difficult task for the blind, who could not know if their writing was
uniform or if the quill was running out of ink.

During the
early 1800’s, Turri in Italy and Ralph Wedgwood in England, working separately,
each created carbon paper. Turri’s paper worked with a typewriting machine.
Wedgwood’s invention, patented in 1806, allowed the blind to write without worrying
about whether the pen had ink – a metal stylus could be used instead.

By 1823,
carbon paper was being marketed in the United States as a general business
product.

Of all the
disabilities, it is blindness that has led to most of the technological innovations
that have later migrated to the general population.

“Blindness
is often an absolute, in a way that deafness isn’t,” Vanderheiden said.

“Changing
from an acoustic to a visual world is not as hard as the opposite.” Raymond
C. Kurzweil, developer of the first practical optical character recognition
software, said: “Blind people are early adopters. They have a much more pressing
need for new technology. Even if it’s not perfected technology, it still provides
a useful sensory aid.”

Kurzweil
said a blind person had once explained to him that the only real handicap for
blind people was their complete lack of access to print. Kurzweil used his expertise
to createthe Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first device that gave the
blind the ability to have printed material read to them by a machine, in 1976.

The machine
combined the first charge‑coupled device flatbed scanner with optical
character recognition software and a text‑to‑speech voice synthesizer.
The scanner transfers the printed document into the machine, the O.C.R. software
translates the words into recognizable text, and the synthesizer translates
that text into understandable spoken English.

The reading
machine wasn’t perfect; it couldn’t recognize every word. But that was not a
fatal flaw. “We didn’t need 100 percent accuracy because a human can always
detect errors and make corrections in one’s own mind,” Kurzweil said.

It was the
strong demand from the blind that made this product successful, Kurzweil said.
“We always knew that there were commercial applications for scanners, O.C.R.
and text‑to‑speech software, and that prices would eventually come
down,” he said. “But if we had pursued the commercial market initially, we might
not have succeeded.”

Today, text‑to‑speech
software lets the blind read text on Web sites and in e-mail. But while some
functions are newly accessible, the popularity of graphically rich Web sites
and operating systems like Windows and Mac OS has actually reduced the ability
of blind people to use a personal computer.

Microsoft,
for one, understands that in its attempts to make the Windows operating
system easier to use, it has actually made the system more difficult to use
for a significant minority. To ease accessibility problems, the company has
charged a staff of 40 full‑time employees with insuring that its products
– from Windows to Office – can be mastered by people with physical disabilities.

Software and Web site developers
are encouraged to embed hidden descriptive text in their programs so text‑to‑speech
software can read the graphics to people with limited vision.

“We’re enforcing
stricter requirements for those who want to use our Windows logo on softwarepackaging,” said Luanne LaLonde, the productmanager for Microsoft
in the accessibility and disabilities group. “People will need to follow our
accessibility rules.” Thanks to those standards, Word and Excel users can magnify
their screens and increase the size of their toolbars, both features first perfected
for the visually impaired. Similarly, while the ability to create customized
keyboard shortcuts as substitutes for various computer commands is now taken
for granted, that concept was in fact originally developed to help those with
physical disabilities find keys they could easily use.

The World
Wide Web Consortium has developed a set of accessibility guidelines to help
the visually impaired easily read Web sites; for example, every button on a
Web page should have accurate and appropriately descriptive text tags. Otherwise,
clicking on a button marked Search on a site might prompt text‑to‑speech
software to say only “button.”

Marti McCuller,
a legally blind Web site developer, was frustrated by her difficulty in navigating
through search engines. “My text‑to‑speech software let me read
the various search sites,” she said, “but they often put so many links on a
page it became hard to use.”

That
is because the blind, even with text‑reading software, cannot glance at
a page. There is no way for them to get a quick visual overview of a site’s
contents and make mental notes about where it would be worthwhile clicking and
exploring later. Rather, the blind must laboriously click from line to line,
determining by a process of elimination where they want to go.

As
a solution, Ms. McCuller created her own search engine, an amalgam of other
search sites that does not force the user to move slowly around the site and
wade through advertisements to find the right place to enter a query. Search
words are entered at the top of the page, and appropriate links are displayed
above all other material as well. Users do not need to tab through extraneous
material.

The search
engine has become popular with the sighted as well as the blind. “Those who
can see like the fact that there are no ads getting in the way of their information,”
Ms. McCuller said.

Text‑to‑speech
and speech‑to‑text technologies, staple tools of the blind, have
become integral parts of a new generation of software that allows consumers
to retrieve their e-mail by phone, program household devices, and speak to business
colleagues around the world even though they speak different languages.

The Clarion
Corporation uses speech‑to‑text software originally developed by
Kurzweil and licensed from the Lernout & Hauspie Corporation for Auto PC,
an in‑car computer that responds to voice commands and reads e-mail and
other information.

Hax.com
utilizes text‑to‑speech software to give consumers the ability to
hear their phone messages, e-mail, and eventually, their faxes over the telephone.

The service
is popular with business people and others who are often not near a computer,
said the company’s president, Gary Hickox. In the future, a customer will be
able to dictate a letter overthe phone and have it sent as an e-mail
text message.

Lernout
& Hauspie has demonstrated its new simultaneous translation system, which
with just a one‑second delay allows the user to speak in English and have
the words translated into another language in a grammatically correct manner
with a natural‑sounding voice.

Voice‑to‑text
software translates the words into machine‑readable text, which text‑to‑text
software translates. Text‑to‑voice software simulates the sounds
of the other language, using the company’s Real Speak speech synthesis software.

“Fifteen
to 20 years from now, voice input and output for computers could be the norm,”
said Greg Lowney, Microsoft’s director for
accessibility.

A restaurant filled with
diners talking into their voice-activated pocket‑size devices may be the
price for society’s attempt to extend the fruits of the technological revolution
to all.